WASHINGTON — A Georgia lawyer who bragged he was part of the mob that took over the U.S. Capitol Building in a “hand to hand hostile takeover” will move forward to trial after rejecting a plea offer over the weekend, the Justice Department told a federal judge Monday.
William McCall Calhoun Jr., of Americus, Georgia, appeared before U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich on Monday for a status hearing. It began with the news that Calhoun, who faces a felony charge of obstruction of an official proceeding, had declined the government’s plea offer.
Calhoun and his friend, Verden Andrew Nalley, were arrested in January and indicted the following month on multiple charges for entering the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. Nalley pleaded guilty in December to one count of entering and remaining in a restricted building. He’s set to be sentenced on March 10.
Nalley could be called to testify against Calhoun at trial, but Calhoun’s own social media posts could be the bigger issue. Calhoun made multiple posts to Facebook on January 6 describing himself storming police barricades and entering the Capitol.
“The first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door and pushed down the hall towards her inner sanctum, the mob howling with rage – Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces, but she was nowhere to be seen,” Calhoun wrote in one post.
In another post, he bragged he had helped bring the government to its knees and promised to come back “armed for war.”
Even before the Capitol riot, the FBI was receiving tips about Calhoun’s alarming social media posts. In November 2020, a little more than a week after the presidential election, the FBI National Threat Operation Center received a phone call about Calhoun reporting he’d been making threats on Facebook, Twitter and Parler.
“Some of you will live long enough to be exterminated with extreme prejudice,” Calhoun allegedly wrote in one post.
“We are going to kill every last communist who stands in Trump’s way,” he reportedly said in another.
If convicted at trial of the most serious charge against him – obstruction of an official proceeding – Calhoun faces up to 20 years in prison. He was schedule to appear again in court in April, at which point Friedrich was expected to set a trial date.
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